The Plan is Always Changing

Most recent developments:

I am now a resident of Park Slope after 8 years as a committed Manhattan gal. I love Park Slope - it's the closest thing to Prenzlauer Berg you can get outside of Berlin.

Postponing Eastern Europe a bit. Been getting a lot of tv work and I want to see where I can go with that before I skip town again.

Things are over with Joe. The answer is Yes; you can set me up with your cute cousin/nephew/friend from prep school.

My Plan

My current thinking...

Performing "Bella's Dream" made me realize how badly I want to know my family's history and therefore I have decided to spend some time this summer visiting the towns where my family comes from in Poland and Belarus.

After that I'm planning to study at Pardes for one of the summer sessions, and possibly visit Turkey, one of my fantasy travel destinations, before heading out west to make a name for myself in La-La Land.

Silent Huddle

A group of Jewish women had been rounded up from the town. A bucket near the border crossing had a sign in German that said "put a contribution in or we'll shoot the women." The guards took the money and shot all the women anyway. That is how Bella and Raymond crossed the border. (This text loosely based on Dana's words in the play.)

"Bella's Dream" in Baltimore

Last night I performed "Bella's Dream" by Dana Boll in Baltimore.

The show is about Dana's grandparents, Bella and Raymond, who left Gabin, Poland in the late 30s, escaped to Russia, were interned in a work camp about Siberia, made their way on a cattle car through Uzbekistan and eventually settled in New Jersey.

The script and choreography beautifully told the story of these exceptional people and of Dana's journey to understand and remember them.

Here are a few photos of our work.

The dancers are Dana Boll, Lisa Hokans, Grace Ann Dorse, Heather Bloch, Dawn Trautman and myself (Rebecca Jupiter.)

A Day in the Life - My First LA Film Gig!

Last weekend I spent three days on the set of "A Day in the Life." It's a short film produced by Green Ambassadors, a cute, campy comedy about a day in the life of a typical American family. Each scene consists of the unreflective choice and the green choice we could make to replace it.

It was such a treat to be silly, funny and quirky on set.

The film will be shown at the LA Convention Center in April and at an environmental festival and various schools. Once I have the dvd, maybe I'll have my own screening for those who want to see it!

Hannah Engle Memorial Lecture

On Tuesday, NYU Wagner hosted the Second Annual Hannah Engle Memorial Lecture. I gave the following remarks about Hannah.

Hannah Beth Engle was born on November 6, 1980. She weighed nine pounds, fourteen ounces. This is pretty heavy for a baby, and I had been almost as heavy, and as children, we were so embarrassed about being fat babies, but the older we got, the more we relished those birth weights for the reliable shocks they produced in anyone we told. As an adult, Hannah loved that the chubby baby she had been had grown into a beautiful woman. She loved to surprise people with her unique blend of seeming contradictions.

Hannah stood out in a crowd – tall, blonde and poised. And that was part of her charm. But good looks will only get you so far, and Hannah didn’t rely on them. She was smart, hard-working, committed and innovative. After taking a meaningful trip to Eastern Europe, she defied expectations by raising $50,000 to take ten other UCLA on a similar trip the next year. These trailblazers led seders in Russia and the Ukraine and brought fresh blood to a Jewishly anemic corner of the diaspora. Hannah lived her philosophy of Jewish communal service in her personal life.

A lot of people who lose siblings find that they become more like their sibling after their death. In the past two years, I have definitely followed Hannah’s lead – both deliberately and unconsciously. One thing that’s happened is that I have made an effort to become the organized person she was.

Hannah didn’t wallow in perfectionism. She analyzed a project, determined what could be simplified and then set to work on her tasks. She was famous for finding time to make Shabbat dinner for 12 people despite being in grad school and working almost full time. (And working out.) I remember once coming over on a Friday afternoon before services to help her put the finishing touches on her apartment before dinner – I came across a to-do list for that week that planned out what and when she had to do things. One of the things on her grocery list was a package of pre-grated cheese. A food snob and obsessive homemade warrior, I turned up my nose at the idea of pre-grated cheese. (In fact, I didn’t even know they made it until I saw it on her list!) That list has stuck in my mind, because Hannah’s efficiency wasn’t borne out of a desire to be the best at anything, or to impress people. She had goals, and she wanted to accomplish them.

One of Hannah’s most important goals outside of her professional life was to weave a community for herself. When I was 15 and Hannah was 13, our father, our Papa, died of AIDS. I had already left for prep school two years earlier, and I think that was probably about the time that Hannah started taking community-building seriously for herself. I will never forget hearing her say “your friends are your family, Rebecca.” She used pre-grated cheese so that she could spend those 30 minutes with the people she loved at dinner instead of obsessing over the perfect quiche.

Even people who did not know Hannah well were touched by her – some even after her death. I mourn Hannah’s loss every day, but I do know that the person I lost was a treasure to so many people and a true inspiration. I still meet people all the time who knew her in some tangential way and miss her presence on this earth. There is no doubt that the 500 people at her funeral ached to know she was gone too young.

When Hannah was little, I used to tease her that she looked like a boy. Our parents liked to dress us in matching clothes like twins, which drove me crazy because I just wanted to be an individual. But of course as we got to be adults, looking alike became fun. We reveled in the attention, and truly cherished our unique relationship. Long before Hannah died, she became one of the first things I thanked God for in my daily prayers. I knew what I had, and having lost Papa, I knew to be thankful for it.

During the course of the past two years, I have gone through many different philosophies in an attempt to understand Hannah’s death. There were times when I thought that her death represented a veering off-course of this world, signaling that we are doing something wrong. There have been times when I wondered whether life is totally random. Perhaps Hannah’s death was fated or ordained by God for some purpose. None of these explanations has held up under scrutiny. What I do believe is that each of us is here on this earth to do something. Sometimes our grief blocks us. When we are sad, we must sit with that sadness and express it to the people we trust. Hannah’s death created an enormous amount of sadness. But it also spurred an urgency in many people including myself, to make a meaningful life that is unique to our gifts and strengths. To honor Hannah’s life, we must become more fully ourselves.

Goodbye Ian

Last night Julia took me to hear her friend's band play at the Troubadour here in LA.

I had just gotten off a seemingly endless flight from New York, and for me it was already 1:45 am, so going out wasn't exactly first on my list of things to do, but I figured, I'm in LA to figure out whether I want to live here, so I should try everything, right?

Goodbye Ian was fantastic. There's Doug, the lead singer, an exuberant golden boy. He plays the keyboard and the guitar, although this was stifled somewhat at his announcement that the day before, he had fallen off his skateboard. There's a blissed-out singer (Kerstin?) who also plays electric cello. Another singer/keyboardist/accordian player, a fantastic drummer, a very skilled violinist and an affable bassist.

The music is danceable, the lyrics clever and un-self-conscious.

Definitely check them out if you can!

As I watched the lead singer hop and dance around the stage, I thought to myself - that's what I need to do more of - be free and fearless and musical. That's what ease with oneself an actor needs. Turns out he IS an actor - he's the son on "Big Love."

And that's LA.

Fess up, RC

Remember when you were a little kid and you did something wrong, and then before you knew what was happening, someone caught you? You started to equivocate, tell little white lies, split hairs, change your story. The most obvious thing about your guilt was the way you squirmed in your chair, and your voice went all over the place looking for the exit.

We all know that exit is the truth. The only way to get out of the situation you were in was to accept that you were going to be punished, and then be brave and admit it.

It is really pathetic watching Roger Clemens act like a befuddled little five year-old in front of the Congressional Committee. His guilt is written all over his Good-Old-Boy retellings.

Obama after all

Until the last few hours before the New York primary, I was on the fence. I love Hillary Clinton. I think she's a brilliant, powerful, determined, admirable woman. I think she would make an excellent President. All this false debate about whether she is for change? She has been making important changes in the Senate since she was elected, and before that, she was a pioneer since her early years in college and law school. Her problem is that she's a woman in an extremely misogynist culture. There are countries that we high-minded Americans like to think of as the "third world" where a woman has already held the highest office in the land. But as soon as Hillary wielded the tiniest bit of power alongside Bill, detractors set to work undermining her - the hairstyles, the baking. I'm sure it goes without saying that those things would NEVER have come up if she were male.

So why did I vote for Barack Obama? Unlike all my misty-eyed friends (and I do love you all) I don't actually *like* him that much. He's kind of cocky. But let's face it, he does not inspire the antipathy that Hillary does. The "vast right-wing conspiracy" is no joke - they hate her and they would mortgage their houses to see her go down. Because hating powerful women is still ok, even though we've figured out that racism is wrong.

I look forward to the first Black President. I look forward to the first woman President. I look forward to a time in our country when we will actually be able to tackle the issues that plague us. I voted for Barack in the primary, and I'll vote for either one of them in November. And hopefully we will stop the shameful backslide to the dark ages we've experienced in the last seven years.

Papercut in Memory of Hannah

I made this papercut in memory of Hannah. It's her Hebrew name in the center with a pomegranate below, representing the vast kernels of her diverse soul. And of course vines of life everywhere.

leaving for LA

I've been talking about moving to LA since college, so it might have seemed like an inevitability, but every time I go anywhere, I think I want to move there. (I'm suggestible, would probably be the polite term for my fickle geographical commitments.)

When I got back from Europe and Africa last summer, I didn't think I wanted to live in New York anymore. I had fallen in love in Croatia, wanted to settle down in Berlin or Budapest...I didn't know what was good for me, and I wandered about. Pretty soon after returning home to New York, I met Joe. Then, this past December we traveled to Berlin together and my longings started all over again. I talked his ear off about how badly I wanted to move there. And when we got back to New York, I realized: my love affair is not yet over, I will probably always love New York, but it's time for me to try something new.

This is so difficult. I am leaving an amazing community of friends and the whole life I have built in the last 8 years. But I have to see what is waiting for me in LA - will I be happier there? I hope so.

Atonement

I saw the film last night. Read the book beforehand.

First of all, I thought the film was basically a good adaptation of the book. The screenplay is pretty tight, the acting is good, they certainly pulled out all the stops with cinematography, sets, costumes, locations, etc.

Briony feels that she is really the one who has kept Cecilia and Robbie apart. I agree - what she did was certainly wrong and the class-based society that assumes Robbie is guilty is problematic. But what I felt more than anything was how war destroys everyone's life. I am used to examining World War II in the context of the Holocaust and how it affected Jews. But this film really shows how deeply affected the British were by the war, how devastating it was not only for soldiers who saw and experienced horrific deaths, injuries and conditions, and also for the nurses who cleaned it all up and put on a calm, collected air in the face of things they had never imagined. And the average citizen, evacuated, or worse, bombed in London.

The word tragedy has become so commonplace, but the more I learn about war, the more I believe it is a tragedy made up of millions of individually tragic stories. Sometimes we only value the worst tragedies, so we focus on the most extreme things we have heard of, but a great love torn apart by war is indeed a tragedy whose importance should not be diminished. I believe that love is the most important thing in this world.

Hannah's Second Yartzheit

It's still so hard to believe that Hannah has a yartzheit.

I have so many questions, many of which will never be answered. Why did this happen? Will I be able to survive life without her? Is there any meaning to life, does everything turn out for the best?

The pain of missing Hannah definitely ebbs and flows now that it has been a while. When she first died, I remember feeling so much pain, everything set me off. Every time the train pulled into the 96th Street station where we would always meet up to go downtown, I would burst into tears. I go there every day, so that pain has diminished. Or at least I had thought so. The other day, I was huddled into my puffy coat (really Hannah's) and the train pulled into the station, and I realized, I'm in as much pain now as I ever was. I miss her from a place in my chest that contracts in agony thinking about her. It's just that the novelty has worn off. There's nothing new or interesting about my pain now. It's repetitive. I miss her. Why did this happen? 25 years old. No meaning, no purpose, no sense. The obvious swirls around me, and others don't know what to say in response, so I've pretty much stopped saying it. But it doesn't change the pain. In fact, as anyone knows who keeps something inside, it probably hurts more now.

After that initial month, I had the briefest sense of relief. I had survived Shloshim. I began putting on makeup again, shaved my legs. I would be ok. Then my mind finally recognized reality: Hannah would not be coming back. My month of agony wasn't a penance that would allow her to return. In fact, her death wasn't personal. She didn't die as a punishment for me - if so, how to explain the pain everyone else felt? I couldn't find any reason to explain her death. And I began to live in a new world. An irrational world with no explanations, no answers and no peace. When Hannah had been alive, even if we were in a fight, we would still say we loved each other before we went to bed or got off the phone or said goodbye. We knew from losing Papa suddenly that you don't always get a second chance to say something, and that pride was no reason to spend a lifetime regretting something. And now the precious treasure I thanked God for in every Amidah was gone.

I wish I had some brilliant understanding of Hannah's life and death. Unfortunately what I feel more than anything is a vast desert around me, with mirages of happiness that don't seem meant for me. And the bubbly, no-nonsense girl who wowed everyone with her varied spectrum of talents, interests, wisdom and beauty? She's a story, a word that makes normal people hush in discomfort. In an instant, the Hannah who cultivated joy and decisiveness became a reason for sadness and questioning.

Boo-hoo! Writers strike cancels Golden Globes

But the upside is I won't be staying up all night waiting to hear which film won Best Drama. (I'm still reading the book so I can't see Keira's wet body yet!)

Shooting Open/Shut - my latest film

I am working on "Open/Shut" by the Italian director Fabrizio Schepisi. It's a great opportunity for me and very close to my heart because I play a character whose older brother has died in a plane crash. It's an emotional challenge but extremely rewarding and important. My younger brother is played by Alex Jacovelli. Hopefully I'll have some shoot stills soon!

Kevin Kline's Makeup Chair

Last night we went to see the penultimate performance of Cyrano de Bergerac with Kevin Kline in the title role. Not surprisingly, he was excellent. His movements were as agile as his speech. An unbeatable swordfighter and a poet.

The theme of honor ran through the play - first, the "fop" from Scene 1 would rather duel with Cyrano than lose face after being criticized by him. Later, Cyrano doesn't tell Roxane that he was writing Christian's letters because he doesn't want to spoil the idea she had of her perfect husband. Roxane herself clings to honor as she mourns her unconsummated marriage for the next 15 years after Christian's death. Understandably, her chaste life in a convent was snipped from the Steve Martin version we all enjoyed years ago.

When someone we love dearly dies, it can be so hard to reintegrate. The romance of loving a dead person is so unmarred. It's the gritty annoyances of daily life with our living loved ones that grounds us in reality and keeps us from idealizing them. There is a certain kind of honor associated with putting a deceased person on a pedestal - not wanting to speak ill of the dead, for example.

But the honor Cyrano's contemporaries felt was more the kind of honor that Dinah's brothers used to justify killing the men who raped her, or the "honor killings" in the Islamic world. This seems to me a far cry from the natural state of things.

I prefer the honorable nature that Kevin Kline demonstrated after the curtain call: A member of the cast had lost everything during the week to a disastrous fire, so to help recover the costs, Kevin auctioned off his makeup chair, which the whole cast signed onstage, to the highest bidder - $3000.

How to Speak Woman a success!

On Saturday and Sunday my cast did a great job performing "How to Speak Woman." The Sunday performance was particularly fun. The audience loved it and we all went out afterwards to celebrate. It was such a pleasure to work with professional, talented, positive people!

On another note, please accept my apologies - "Sleeping Handsome" has been cancelled.

in Berlin

Already there's so much to say...
I'm here in Berlin, one of my favorite cities ever. I was here in August of 2006 on my "world tour" - 10 weeks in Africa and Central Europe - and now I am back. But this time I am doing a program called "Young American Jews Meet Modern Germany" which will soon be renamed "Germany Up Close." It is run by Dr. Dagmar Pruin, a theologian and fascinating woman who is a professor at Humboldt University here in Berlin. (Not the one in California, although that one is named after the same person.)

Anyway, the focus of this trip is Jewish life in Germany in the present, and in order to understand the full scope, we have been learning about history and visiting many memorials and historical sites. I'm fascinated, just devouring every tour guide and German greeter we meet with questions and discussion. (Surprise, I'm curious.)

We met with Karsten Voigt at the Federal Foreign Office - he has a fascinating history of nurturing the Jewish voice in Germany as he believes that the first Jews to be killed in the Nazi regime were really the most advanced socio-political thinkers of the day and the Jewish community is inherently aligned with his political views. Jews have been living in what is now Germany since the time of the Roman Empire - as long as the Germanic tribes, so the history is inextricably linked.

We attended a very full lecture by Peter Berger at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung on the connections between relativism and fundamentalism - that these are two parallel responses to the challenges of modernity, and that both are detrimental to social order.

Visiting the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was interesting and moving for me despite the fact that I had been there on my previous visit to Berlin. I had many new thoughts and questions. The main thing that came to mind was the "frog in the pot" idea - that little by little the heat is turned up and the frog ends up boiling to death, trying to acclimate at each juncture. Jews tried to accept the civil rights abuses, then the human rights abuses and were finally killed by the Nazis. We can't wait until people are being shot or gassed to react. As is written on a plaque in Bebelplatz, where 20-50,000 books were burned, societies that first begin by burning books later burn people. So true in the case of the Nazis. The memorial itself drives this point home through symbolism - the pillars begin at ground level on the edge of the space but if you walk toward the center, the ground keeps changing and you're eventually surrounded by huge pillars that are two or three times your height. It feels scary and unknown in there, as if you are hiding, hearing the sounds of others but rarely seeing them. As Joe pointed out, you can't fit other than in single file, so you are alone. By not being able to band together, you lose a lot of power, and this is what regimes like the Nazis want.

Lejb Langfus wrote in 1944 that Jewish women on the horribly cramped cattle cars to the camps exchanged their wedding rings for a sip of water...they were so desperate! I thought of Esau in Genesis and how he sold his birthright to Jacob for a hot meal - he said "what use in the birthright to me when I am on the point of death?" This is always read as Esau "spurning" the birthright but if we consider the desperation a person feels when starved, perhaps there is another way to look at his situation and Jacob should have taken the high road.

This morning we visited the Wannsee House where the conference of high-ranking officials took place to plan the Final Solution on 20 January 1942. Our guide, Elke Gryglevski, lived in Israel as a volunteer in teh Action Reconciliation Services for Peace, which helps countries that were negatively affected by the Nazi regime. There is a much stronger relationship between Israel and Germany than I was previously aware of.

We also visited Mahnmal Gleis 17, where Jews were carted off to the camps from the Grunewald train station - just a few feet from the nearest house. In fact, this neighborhood was 40% Jewish before the war. The memorial was beautifully symbolic of the weakening of society when some elements are removed - it was a cement wall with human body shapes hollowed out. People just disappeared, dropped off the face of the earth when they were taken away to the camps.

I'm directing a show!

I am directing "How to Speak Woman" by Ray Payton, produced by Theatervision/Playtime. It will perform at the National Comedy Theater on December 22 and 23 at 5pm.

It's really exciting because I have put together a great cast - Alex Rascovar, Julia Wolfermann, Hermann Eppert and Kristen Abate. Van Truster is assistant directing.

"How to Speak Woman" is the story of David, a lovably clueless guy who gets dumped by Tabitha and learns from a mysterious man named Grayson how to have a happy relationship with Debbie.

It's exciting to be on the other side of the script, but don't worry - I'm not done acting. On December 27, my other show, Sleeping Handsome, goes up at Nicu's Spoon Theater.

For tickets to "How to Speak Woman" please visit http://www.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/167

For tickets to "Sleeping Handsome" please email info@spoontheater.org

Hope to see you at the theaters!

Sleeping Handsome

I've been cast as Morgan, the evil princess witch in "Sleeping Handsome" at Nicu's Spoon Theater on 38th Street. The show is really fun, the script is very funny, and the cast is great. I hope to see you all December 27-January 5! I will put the details on my acting website soon.